Developing Gis for Citizen Environmental Monitoring and Hazards Mitigation in Alabama and Sao Paulo, Brazil

This paper will describe the development and evolution of GIS to support environmental quality monitoring and hazards mitigation activities in two citizen-based water watch movements: Alabama Water Watch and Nucleo Pro Tiete in Sao Paulo, Brazil. In both cases, citizen volunteers concerned with creating baseline databases for local watershed areas formed as a result of severe problems in local water quality and because of the lack of baseline data from which to assess these problems. Both view GIS as an important tool in improving their respective organizational capacities to respond to environmental quality problems once detected by citizen-volunteer monitoring and in contributing to environmental policy formation. One aspect of how GIS is being conceived of at Alabama Water Watch and Nucleo Pro Tiete is that the data used in both instances are obtained by citizen volunteers. In both cases, GIS is seen as a tool for organizing recently obtained water quality records from collection points in local watershed areas and integrating these records with other environmental factors. However, Nucleo Pro Tiete and Alabama Water Watch diverge in that the Brazilian GIS model incorporates perceived information about environmental quality objectives, whereas Alabama Water Watch seeks to develop GIS to augment the state’s existing institutional water quality research and assessment efforts. By considering both examples, we find that GIS development from an NGO institutional setting differs in some significant ways from governmental approaches, with important implications for the development of GIS as a tool for responding to local environmental problems in developing settings.